Existence (Philosophy of) 1

Philosophy of existence 1 Heidegger Jacques Taminiaux At the very outset and up to the end, the long philosophical journey of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) remained oriented by a single question, the question of Being, the Seinsfrage. This does not mean, however, that the question preserved the same meaning or ruled an identical field of investigation throughout the whole journey. Indeed, Heidegger himself repeatedly claimed that at some point a turn (Kehre) occurred in his thought. Moreover, thanks to the current publication of his entire corpus (Gesamtausgabe), it is now possible to draw a fair picture of the vicissitudes of the journey. For the purpose of this chapter, I propose to divide Heidegger’s work into two phases. The first covers publications and lecture courses devoted to setting out the project of what Heidegger, at that time, called ‘fundamental ontology’. The later phase covers writings which are all characterized by a meditation on the history of Being. Whereas the project of fundamental ontology aimed at completing metaphysics as the science of Being, the later meditation consistently aimed at overcoming metaphysics. FUNDAMENTAL ONTOLOGY After a few years of study in theology the young Heidegger, who first wanted to become a Catholic priest, had decided for reasons both personal and theoretical to dedicate his life to philosophy. At the turn of the century, the burning area for philosophical research in Germany was logic. Two major trends were in conflict as far as the approach to the basic problems of epistemology and the philosophy of science is concerned. On the one hand under the influence of British empiricism, John Stuart Mill predominantly, many German scholars in those fields were convinced that the foundations of knowledge in general were strictly empirical. Accordingly they were looking for the roots of all cognitive principles in observable facts such as those which are investigated by psychology taken as an empirical science. On the other hand, in a reaction against empiricism, several scholars were attempting to revive in the disciplines at stake the transcendental orientation of Kant’s criticism. In the history of ideas this conflict is known as the quarrel about psychologism between empiricism and transcendentalism. Whereas the former claims that thinking and knowing are a matter of facts occuring in the mind, the latter claims that thought and knowledge, however much they may depend on facts, could not exist without the help of a transcendental cogito. In 1900–1 a book appeared which had a decisive influence in the quarrel: Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations. Like neo-Kantianism, the book was a refutation of all empiricist reductionism. But unlike neo-Kantianism it vindicated a new and original method which was altogether intuitive and a priori: phenomenology. Heidegger’s early writings were contributions to the new phenomenological trend. His doctoral dissertation (1914) was entitled The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism. His Habilitationsschrift (1916), The Theory of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus was inspired by Husserl’s idea of a pure a priori grammar. Heidegger’s genuine project emerged after these academic exercises, when he came to realize that he was less interested in logic for its own sake than in the link between logic and ontology or even in the ontological foundation of the logical. Indeed he repeatedly claimed that the influence on him of the Logical Investigations was at that time on a footing with the impact of a book by one of Husserl’s masters, Brentano’s dissertation On the Manifold Meaning of Being in Aristotle (1862). Brentano showed that in Aristotle the Being of beings is expressed in at least four basic ways: as substance (ousia), as potentiality (dunamis) and actuality (energeia), as truth (alētheia), according to the categories such as quality, quantity, relation and so on. While meditating upon this manifoldness in the meanings of Being, Heidegger raised the following question: is there a unique focus of intelligibility which illuminates these various meanings, a common source for understanding them, and how and where is it to be found? Such is the Seinsfrage, the question of Being. The reappropriation of Husserl and Aristotle On the basis of his early dissertations, Heidegger was already convinced that the phenomenological method was to be his way to address the question. When he became Husserl’s personal assistant at the University of Freiburg-im-Breisgau, thereby gaining the opportunity to become familiar with all aspects of phenomenological research, he came to realize that the work of his master provided him not only with a method but also with basic discoveries thanks to which he was able to transform his ontological question into a genuine field of investigation. On the basis of the posthumous publication of several drafts and lecture courses, it is now possible to draw a fair picture of Heidegger’s early attempts to articulate his own field of ontological investigations thanks to a peculiar retrieval or reappropriation of both Aristotle and Husserl. It could even be demonstrated that Heidegger’s project of fundamental ontology is the outcome of an overlapping of what he considered to be the basic discoveries of Husserl with what he took to be the basic discoveries of Aristotle. This means that, with the help of Husserl’s teaching, Heidegger was able to find in Aristotle’s teaching an authentic phenomenology while, with the help of Aristotle’s teaching, he discovered the possibility of transforming phenomenology into a field of ontological investigation. This ontological overlapping of Aristotle and Husserl is already noticeable in the short manuscript Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle [2.27] that Heidegger wrote in the autumn of 1922 at the request of P.Natorp in order to support his application for a teaching position at the University of Marburg. The overlapping pervades the teaching of Heidegger from the time of his appointment at Marburg until the publication of Being and Time. Heidegger credited Husserl with three basic discoveries useful for articulating his own field of investigation. The first discovery is intentionality. According to Husserl, intentionality is the very structure of consciousness in all its modes (perception, imagination, conceptualization, judgment, reasoning and so on). In every form of consciousness there is a specific relatedness between a specific way of intending and a specific correlate which has its way of appearing qua intended. Already in the 1922 manuscript, Heidegger makes clear that for him this structural relatedness is much more than a basic feature of consciousness. It is the fundamental character of the very life of each human being. De facto, or factically, the life of an existing human being is essentially related. In Heidegger’s language of that time, this means that such relatedness is an ontological character of ‘factical life’. This is why he writes: the complete intentionality (the relatedness to, that towards which there is a relation, the accomplishment of the self-relating, the temporalism of it, the preservation of temporalisation) is nothing but the intentionality of the object which has the ontological character of factical life. Intentionality, merely taken as relatedness to, is the first phenomenal character, proximally noticeable of the fundamental mobility of life, that is of care. ([2.27], 17) Whereas Husserl’s discovery of intentionality was confined within the limits of a theory of consciousness, i.e., within the framework of a theory of knowledge, Heidegger’s peculiar retrieval of the discovery results very early in another philosophical project aiming at an ontology of factical life, or of facticity. Along with this alteration, the new philosophical project entails an alteration in the very notion of logic. In Husserl, logic was another name for the theory of knowledge, i.e., of the basic categories making cognition possible. As a result of the shift from consciousness to factical life, logic becomes a name for the investigation of the ways in which factical life expresses and understands itself as a result of specific categories. This second shift is at the core of Heidegger’s reinterpretation of what he viewed as the second major discovery of Husserl, i.e., the doctrine of categorial intuition. According to this doctrine, the meaning of human discourse (Rede) depends on a complex set of structures, forms and basic concepts which are all of an ideal nature. In spite of the fact that, precisely because they are ideal, these idealities are in a position of excess or surplus vis-à-vis any sensuous content given to sensible perception, they are none the less, claims Husserl in the sixth Logical Investigation, offered to an intuition or insight that is no longer sensible, but ideal: the so-called categorial intuition. Among the categorial intuitions mentioned by Husserl, one stood out as having a decisive relevance for the project to which Heidegger had subscribed from the outset: the problem of the meaning of Being. Indeed in the context of the sixth Logical Investigation Husserl was developing a twofold thesis about Being. First, he stated, in agreement with Kant, that ‘Being is not a real predicate’. Second, he maintained, in contradistinction to Kant, that ‘Being’ is given to categorial intuition. Heidegger took advantage of this double thesis and transformed it for his own ontological purpose. ‘Being is not a real predicate’ meant for both Kant and Husserl that it is not to be found among the predicates which define the quiddity or realitas of beings: what they are. This thesis turned out to mean for Heidegger that Being is not in any sense a being. In other words the thesis amounted to stating a difference between beings and Being, an ontico-ontological difference. Likewise, the thesis according to which ‘Being’ is given to a categorial intuition, which in Husserl was an element of his transcendental logic, turned out to mean for Heidegger that in its factical life the human being has an understanding of Being. In other words, factical life interprets itself in terms of Being. This is to say that the ontology of those factical beings who understand Being is an hermeneutics, or a theory of interpretation. But, by the same token, Husserl’s twofold thesis about Being, thus reappropriated in an ontological framework, induced Heidegger to search in the de facto life of the human being for the unique ground for an intelligibility of the various meanings of Being. It induced him to search for the focus of intelligibility within what he was to call, a little later, the human Dasein. In this search, Heidegger availed himself of a third discovery made by Husserl: the discovery of the a priori, a word with an obvious temporal connotation. Husserl often claimed that time consciousness was the most fundamental consideration of his phenomenology. In order for consciousness to be intentional at all, it has to be temporal. This means for Husserl that in order to be able to intend any intentional correlate, consciousness has to be a ‘living present’, a present which constantly articulates the ‘retention’ of what is just past with the anticipation (or ‘protention’) of what is going to happen. Heidegger, who was to edit in 1928 Husserl’s The Phenomenology of Internal Time-consciousness, took advantage of this third discovery. His ontology of human Dasein aims at demonstrating that temporality is the only horizon within which we understand the meanings of Being. This is condensed in the very title of his masterwork of 1927, Being and Time [2.2, 2.45], a book in which the three Husserlian discoveries operate in a peculiar way along with an Aristotelian inspiration. The link between this inspiration and Husserl’s legacy is already noticeable in the fact that Heidegger, in his Introduction, characterizes the phenomenological method at work in the book by using the very language of Aristotle. What Heidegger discovered very early, as he puts it in a later survey of his ‘way to phenomenology’ is that ‘what occurs for the phenomenology of the acts of consciousness is thought more originally by Aristotle and in all Greek thinking and existence as alētheia’ (On Time and Being [2.70], 78). In its traditional definition, truth is an adequation between the mind and the real, and it occurs in a specific place: the predicative judgment. In one way, Husserl’s phenomenology contributed to overcoming the classical notion of truth. For Husserl indeed, prior to the so-called adequatio intellectus ad rem (of the mind to the thing), the touchstone of truth is evidence, i.e., the self-manifestation of the object qua phenomenon to intentionality. Moreover, Husserl claimed that the locus of truth is in no way restricted to the predicative judgment: it is intentionality itself, or consciousness in all its forms. Heidegger took advantage of this breakthrough in his phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle. As far as truth is concerned, the Greek philosopher, he claims, is more original than Husserl on two accounts: first because he understands truth as the unconceal-ment of beings for an unconcealing being, the human being; second because this unconcealing, instead of being restricted to consciousness, is attributed by him to the human comportment as such, more precisely to the human way of being. In other words, for Aristotle, claims Heidegger, alētheia, or truth, is a matter of bios, of life or of existence. It is in the context of this phenomenological reading of Aristotle that Heidegger was led to replace the words ‘factical life’ by the key word Dasein in order to characterize the human way of being. In German the word is both a verb meaning ‘to be present’, or to exist, and a noun meaning ‘presence’, or existence. Moreover, da the prefix of the word, means both there and then; it points to a place and time for something to happen. Heidegger’s use of the word to characterize the human way of being is an attempt to suggest that the concrete existence of a human being is a phenomenon which is there, thrown into a place and a time in which an unconcealment happens. But in addition to a concept of truth in terms of existence, Heidegger also discovered in Aristotle a concrete analysis of human existence as an unconcealing way of being. The ontological reappropriation of Husserl’s discovery of intentionality taught him that human existence as such is a relatedness to. The reappropriation of Husserl’s discovery of categorial intuition taught him that human existence, in its relatedness to, understands Being. Likewise, the appropriation of Husserl’s discovery of the a priori taught him that time is at the core of the understanding of Being. Since those three ontological reappropriations were oriented by a single question—where is the source for the understanding of Being to be found?—they all required an analysis of Dasein as the being who understands Being. In other words they required an analysis of Dasein’s way of being, i.e., for an ontology of Dasein. And here Heidegger discovered very early that Aristotle’s description of human comportment paved the way to the ontology of Dasein that he was attempting to articulate. His lecture courses of the Marburg period demonstrate that, in his view, the Nicomachean Ethics was such an ontology. It is in such terms that Heidegger deals with Aristotle’s Ethics in the introduction to his celebrated lecture course of 1924–5 on Plato’s Sophist [2.29], which had a deep influence on those who originally heard it, including Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Jonas. The Nicomachean Ethics scrutinizes the dianoetic excellences or intellectual virtues and establishes them in a hierarchy. According to Aristotle these virtues have two levels: the lower are the deliberative excellences, the higher are the epistemic excellences. At the lower level two deliberative virtues take place: technē and phronēsis. In Greek technē means art, in the sense of knowhow. Heidegger insists that in Aristotle technē is an intellectual excellence because it is a matter of truth, of alētheia as unconcealment. It is a peculiar way of disclosing, or discovering, what is required for a specific comportment: the productive comportment called poiēsis. In other words, it is a way of knowing truth, or even of being in truth, linked with a peculiar way of being: the production of such and such a work or result. However, claims Heidegger, the reason why Aristotle puts technē on the lowest rank among the deliberative excellences is to be understood in terms of an ontology of Dasein. Indeed, in the productive way of being which is ruled by technē, Dasein is busy with, and concerned by, products or results out there. To that extent the pair technē-poiēsis suffers an ontological deficiency. To be sure, the principle for the productive activity informed by an unconcealing knowhow is within the agent, hence within the Dasein and of the same nature as Dasein itself: it is the model conceived by the agent and held in view by him. But the telos or end of productive activity is in no way within Dasein or of its nature: it occurs outside of Dasein. This ontological deficiency, claims Heidegger, is no longer the case in the second deliberative excellence, namely phronēsis, also conceived by Aristotle as a peculiar way of disclosing, or of being in truth, adjusted to a specific comportment or active way of being. This active way of being is no longer poiēsis but praxis, i.e., action in the sense of the conduct by an individual of his or her own life. Phronēsis discloses to Dasein the potentiality of its own existence. Here again, according to Heidegger, the reason why Aristotle puts phronēsis on the highest level among the deliberative excellences is to be understood in terms of an ontology of Dasein. Indeed neither the principle of phronēsis nor its goal falls outside the human being. The principle here is a prior option of the Dasein for well-doing, while the end is the very way of being of Dasein, its own praxis. Phronēsis is nothing but the resoluteness to exist in the highest possible manner. Thus understood in ontological terms, Aristotle’s distinction between the technēpoiēsis and the phronēsis-praxis distinctions allowed Heidegger to set up the framework of his own ontology of Dasein, as a being who understands Being. This ontology, which was to be developed in Being and Time, describes the existence of Dasein in terms of a tension between an everyday way of Being in which the Dasein is not authentically who it is, and an authentic way of Being in which Dasein is properly itself. The description shows that in everydayness Dasein cannot be its ownmost Being, because it lives in a condition of preoccupation or concern for ends to be attained by a variety of means or tools, a condition which is enlightened by a specific circumspection about surroundings. To that extent everydayness is ruled by Das Man, the ‘They’. In it everybody is nobody, because such a condition never confronts Dasein’s own existence. This description is the outcome of a peculiar reappropriation of Aristotle’s doctrine concerning technē and poiēsis. On the other hand, the analytic of Dasein shows that Dasein authentically becomes a Self by confronting its ownmost potentiality for Being. It does so by accepting existence in its finitude, as a Being-unto-death. This description, with the exception of the emphasis put on anxiety, is again the result of a peculiar reappropriation of Aristotle’s analysis of phronēsis and praxis. Aristotle indeed insists that phronēsis, as a dianoetic virtue, has its proper realm in the perishable. On the other hand, Heidegger occasionally suggested when he was teaching Aristotle that the latter’s concept of phronēsis somehow anticipates the notion of conscience (Gewissen). And conscience in Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein is the phenomenon in which Dasein listens to a call from it own depths summoning it to confront its finitude. But the Aristotelian inspiration in Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein is not restricted to technē and phronēsis. It also includes a peculiar reappropriation of Aristotle’s doctrine of the epistemic virtues. In the Nicomachean Ethics these virtues are epistēmē (science) and sophia (wisdom). Both are adjusted to theoria, i.e., to a purely contemplative attitude, which bears upon a realm which is no longer perishable, a realm which is forever what it is and how it is. For Aristotle that realm is higher than the realm of human affairs precisely because it is not perishable as they are. And in his view it is at this level only, specifically at the level of sophia, that a true concern with Being can take place, as a contemplation of the ontological structure of the totality of beings and of the prime mover which is the principle for all movements of physis (nature). Heidegger insists, in his Marburg lectures, that, according to Aristotle, the contemplation of that immutable realm is the most authentic way of being that a mortal can attain, because as long as such contemplation lasts, the mortal spectator lives in the proximity of the divine. According to Heidegger’s teaching in the Marburg period, there is in the Aristotelian concept of sophia an equivocation between ontology as the science of the Being of beings and theology as the science of the divine. There is also an indeterminacy, because for Aristotle the only meaning of Being is limited to what he calls ousia, i.e., in Heidegger’s interpretation, presence in the sense of presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit). This meaning of Being, Heidegger says, is adjusted to nature, but it is not relevant as far as the Being of Dasein is concerned. Moreover, considering presence as the only meaning of Being amounts to understanding Being in the light of a temporality in which only the present is important. This temporality, considered as a succession of present moments, is in fact the concept of time that Aristotle develops in his Physics. Heidegger raised objections to the predominance of this concept. In the case of the Being of Dasein, putting the emphasis only on the present is one-sided and misleading. In order for Dasein to be authentically present, it has to retrieve who it was as thrown in its own Being as well as to anticipate its own end. Whereas the temporality of nature is ruled by the exclusive privilege of the present, the temporality of Dasein not only is determined by a triad, in which three ecstasis— past, present, and future—co-operate, but also is ruled by the privilege of the future. Accordingly, Heidegger, who agrees with Aristotle in considering the contemplation (theoria) of Being as the authentic accomplishment of Dasein, reorients that contemplation exclusively towards the finite being of Dasein and its finite temporality. As a result, fundamental ontology claims to be able to overcome both the ontotheological equivocation and the ontological indeterminacy which characterized the ancient ontology and its legacy. The overcoming includes a deconstruction (Destruktion) of the ancient concepts along with a reversal of the old hierarchy between the perishable and the immutable. This deconstruction aims at demonstrating that for the most part the basic concepts of ancient philosophy and consequently of the entire western tradition of metaphysics—concepts such as matter (hulē) and form (morphē), potentiality (dunamis) and actuality (energeia), idea (eidos), substance (hupokeimenon), and so on—find their phenomenal origin in the activity of production, an activity which in order to be possible at all presupposes the permanence of nature, and liberates its products from their link to the producer to bestow on them a permanence similar to the natural one. Consequently these ontological concepts, instead of being coined after the authentic ontological experience that Dasein has of its own Being, were coined in the inauthentic framework of everydayness. In such a framework Dasein, while coping with entities which are readyto- hand, pays attention to a meaning of Being—presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit)— which is not adjusted to finite existence as its own way of Being. In other words, the genealogy carried out by deconstruction aims at showing that Greek ontology, in its concern for the eternal features of nature, was mistaken in believing that the contemplation of those features allowed the philosopher to go beyond the finitude and reach the proximity of the divine. Quite the contrary; it remained trapped within everydayness. Here appears the reversal: the so-called overcoming of finitude was a falling away from it. The falling away from the authentic towards the inauthentic explains the predominance of the notion of presence-at-hand in traditional ontology. As a result of this reversal, the notion of transcendence, which traditionally defined the position of the divine above the lower realm of immanence, was transformed by Heidegger to designate the process through which the Dasein goes beyond beings towards Being: only the Dasein properly transcends, and it transcends beings towards Being. The articulation of the project Heidegger’s project, inspired by a singular appropriation of Husserl and Aristotle, of fundamental ontology, designed as a reply to the question of the meaning of Being, included two tasks which provide the structure of Being and Time [2.2; 2.45]. The first part of the treatise was supposed to be devoted to ‘the interpretation of Dasein in terms of temporality, and the explication of time as the transcendental horizon for the question of Being’ (pp. 39; 63). The book, which came out in 1927, announced three divisions of Part One: (1) ‘the preparatory fundamental analysis of Dasein’; (2) ‘Dasein and temporality’ (Zeitlichkeit); (3) ‘time and Being’ (pp. 39; 64). The third division never appeared. Part Two of the treatise was supposed to deal with the ‘basic features of a phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology, with the problematic of Temporality [Temporalität] as our clue’ (pp. 39; 63). This part, which also never appeared, was designed to have three divisions: the first one dealing with Kant’s doctrine of schematism, the second with the ontological foundation of Descartes’ cogito sum, the third with Aristotle’s essay on time. The published portion of Part One (which made Heidegger instantly famous) proceeded in two steps, corresponding to divisions one and two. If Part One starts with an analysis of Dasein, it is because the leading question of the meaning of Being rebounds as it were on the one who poses it. Indeed Dasein is the only being for whom Being is a question or an issue. If such analysis has to be fundamental, it is because, instead of restricting itself to the teachings of disciplines such as anthropology, psychology or biology, it must treat Dasein as a being for whom Being itself is the question, and not ‘what is man?’, ‘what is mind?’ or ‘what is life?’ If such analysis is preparatory, however, it is because it is carried out not for its own sake but in order to provide an answer to the question of the meaning of Being. But even leaving aside the problem of what is prepared by it, the analysis of Dasein is not governed at all by the traditional question ‘what?’ Instead of addressing the question ‘what is Dasein?’ the analysis has to address the question ‘who is Dasein?’ Indeed the question ‘what?’ is not adjusted to Dasein for the reason that, in its de facto existence, Dasein is such that its very essence lies in its ‘to be’ (Zusein), or in its ‘existence’, a word which indicates an openness to a task, a possibility, and which is allotted by Heidegger solely to Dasein in order to avoid any confusion with the traditional use of existentia as equally valid for designating the Being of any entity whatsoever. In Heidegger’s terminology the meaning of the word existentia, in its traditional use, is ‘presence-athand’, and is appropriate only to entities which are precisely not of Dasein’s character. Dasein is thus the only entity in which existence has a priority over essence. Moreover if the question ‘what?’ has to be replaced by the question ‘who?’, it is because there is no Dasein in general, because an individual Dasein is not a special instance of some genus. Dasein as an entity for which Being is an issue in its very Being, is ‘in each case mine’ (pp. 42; 67–8). As an entity which is its own possibility or existence and which is in each case mine, Dasein, in its very Being, can win or lose itself. ‘Mineness’ grounds either authenticity or inauthenticity. The German words, Eigentlichkeit and Uneigentlichkeit, have no moral connotation. Eigentlichkeit designates a condition in which someone is its own Being; Uneigentlichkeit refers to a condition in which someone is not properly its own Being. As a result of the priority of existence over essence, the fundamental analysis of Dasein has to treat it from the existentiality of its existence. The access to the basic characters of that existentiality is given in the condition in which Dasein is ‘proximally and for the most part’—everydayness. These basic characters of existentiality are called existentialia. Because mineness grounds either authenticity or inauthenticity, all existentialia have an authentic and inauthentic modality. They all have a transcendental status, which means that they are a priori conditions of possibility for Dasein’s existence. They are factors or items of a constitutive state of Dasein that Heidegger calls ‘being-in-the-world’. Being-in-the-world is the primordial phenomenon which has to be analysed in order to uncover the existentialia. Though the phenomenon is unitary, it is possible to look at it in three ways, by putting the emphasis on the ‘world’ as such, or on the ‘being-in’ as such, or on the one ‘who’ is in the world. The world is neither the total amount of entities composing what is usually called the universe nor a framework for those entities. It is neither a global container nor an addition of contents. It is not nature. In order for nature to appear, a world is presupposed. The world must be understood a priori in terms of existentiality. Properly speaking, only Dasein is in the world, and there would be no world without Dasein intimately open to it. And since Dasein is not present-at-hand but existing, the world is not a global presenceat- hand that constantly encircles Dasein. Because Dasein’s existence is its own ‘can be’ or possibility, the world which is at issue in the phrase ‘being-in-the-world’ must be described in terms of possibility, but a possibility which is already given. It is an existentiale. If we take as clue our everyday way of Being, we must admit that our comportment is characterized as a concern with an environment. Within that concern we do not merely observe things present-at-hand. Instead we are constantly busy dealing with entities of a pragmatic nature endowed with a pragmatic meaning that we understand. Each of these entities is essentially ‘something in-order-to’, it is an instrument adjusted to this or that purpose. None of those entities is isolated. They are all interrelated, and in order for them to appear as ‘in-order-to’, they all presuppose as backdrop a context of involvement, with which we are familar. Such involvement is that ‘wherein’ we understand our ways and that ‘for which’ we let entities be encountered and used. But the involvement presupposed by our everyday concern itself refers to a deeper a priori which is the very relatedness of Dasein to its own potentiality for Being. This ultimate ‘for the sake of which’ is not a possibility within the world, it is the world itself as Dasein’s own potentiality. World is another name for Being as that for the sake of which Dasein is transcending. Similarly ‘Being-in’ has to be understood in terms of existentiality. And since existence as such is a disclosing process, the ‘Being-in’ is better captured as a lighting or as an openness than as an insertion. Three existentialia constitute the ‘Being-in’: disposition, comprehension and discourse. Disposition (Befindlichkeit) is the state in which Dasein finds itself. That Dasein essentially finds itself in some state is revealed by the moods or humours making manifest how one is. In terms of existentiality, moods reveal that Dasein has been delivered over to the Being is has to be. Heidegger calls ‘thrownness’ the facticity of being delivered over to Being. Hence disposition discloses Dasein in its thrownness. Comprehension (Verstehen) is also to be conceived in terms of existentiality. In order to comprehend or understand the significance of the utensils it deals with in everydayness, Dasein has to project itself upon this or that possibility. In any act of understanding, there is some projection. But the de facto projections pervading Dasein’s ordinary comportment have their ontological foundation in Dasein’s projection upon its own ‘can be’. As an existentiale, comprehension discloses Dasein itself in its own potentiality-for-Being. ‘Discourse is existentially equiprimordial with disposition and comprehension’ (161). The German word for discourse is Rede, which is Heidegger’s translation of the Greek logos. In terms of existentiality, discourse is the disclosing articulation of the intelligibility of Being-in-the-world. The reply to the question ‘“who” is in the world?’ shows that Dasein in its everyday mode of Being is not properly a Self. Most of the time it loses itself in what it is busy with. In other words it understands itself in terms of what is ready-to-hand within the world. On the other hand it essentially belongs to Dasein to be with other Daseins. But here again the everyday mode of Being-with-one-another is such that Dasein is absorbed in the neutrality of the ‘They’ (das Man), instead of confronting its own Dasein. In both cases the inauthentic prevails over the authentic. Heidegger calls ‘fallenness’ the tendency Dasein has to forget its own Self or to move away from it. Fallenness is an existentiale. As a result of such a tendency, all the existentialia have two modalities: an authentic and an inauthentic one. For example, discourse in its inauthentic form is idle talk. Likewise comprehension in its inauthentic form is curiosity. We can readily see that a temporal connotation is involved in the description of all these items. Already pre-given as a ‘wherein’, the world is a past. But as constantly anticipated as a ‘for which’, it is a future as well. A temporal dimension is also involved in the three interconnected modes of disclosure which constitute ‘Being-in’. Since disposition discloses the facticity of Dasein’s thrownness, it reveals that it belongs to existence to have already been. It is also obvious in the case of comprehension as a project: if Dasein itself is a project, this means that structurally it throws itself forwards in the direction of a future. Discourse as an existentiale also shows a temporal dimension. By articulating ‘Being-in-the-world’ it expresses both the thrownness and the self-projection of Dasein. Likewise, if the ontological answer to the question ‘who?’ has to be expressed in terms of a tension between authenticity and inauthenticity, the answer itself either emphasizes a future or, concerning the rule of the ‘They’ and of the everyday equipment, the predominance of what is currently the case. Once Being-in-the-world is analysed in its constitutive items, there must be a synthetic return to the unitary character of the phenomenon. Heidegger characterizes the ontological unity of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world with a single word, Sorge, usually translated by the word ‘care’. Care is the transcendental structure at the root of all the existential features mentioned so far. Care, as the ontological unifying structure of Dasein, is revealed in the fundamental disposition of anxiety, thanks to which Dasein realizes that it is already thrown in the world, that it has to be its own Being, and that it is thus thrown and projecting itself in a condition of proximity to inner-worldly beings whose Being is not its own Being. In the experience of anxiety the three intercon-nected dimensions of care are disclosed: facticity, possibility, fallenness among other beings. This is a turning point in the existential analytic: it opens the way to the second division of Part One: Dasein and temporality. The phenomenon of care is now manifest in its unity. However, the question remains: what about its totality? A phenomenon appears as a whole when its limits are made visible. Hence the problem is: what are the limits of care as the basic structure of existence? Clearly the limits of existence are birth and death. If we consider both limits as terms of a process which is not intrinsically determined by them, then we might say that, as soon as we exist, birth is over and that until we cease to exist, death is not there. But this view does not fit with Dasein’s mode of Being: a project which is thrown. Precisely because Dasein’s project is thrown, birth is not a mere moment which is over as soon as Dasein exists. Dasein cannot be who it is without having been thrown in the world with the limited possibilities which from the outset condition its Being. Likewise death is not the other external limit of existence. Existence as a project includes in itself, i.e., in its potentiality, its own end. This means that Dasein’s death is not restricted to its Being-atthe- end. It is rather a manner of Being that Dasein takes over as soon as it is. It thoroughly permeates existence. It makes Dasein’s project essentially finite and turns it into a Being-towards-the-end. Because of such finitude, a negative feature, a negativity determines care in relation to both thrownness and project. What about the third dimension of care, i.e., the proximity with other beings? Is it also determined by negativity? The answer is ambiguous. It can be if and only if Dasein resolutely takes over its own mortality. But for the most part, because the proximity with other beings entails a predominance of pragmatic preoccupation over care, Dasein covers up its own finitude and thinks of death as a contingent event occurring to everybody and to nobody. They die, I don’t. This description allows us to understand how temporality is the ground of the ontological constitution of Dasein. According to ordinary views and a philosophical tradition going back to Aristotle, time is an unlimited sequence of moments, including the moments which once were but no longer are, those which are not yet and the one which is now. The sequence is considered to be irreversible and measurable. Heidegger claims that such a concept of time was shaped not on the basis of a phenomenal analysis of Dasein but on the basis of the experience of nature. Instead, the original concept of time has to be articulated in conformity with the ontological constitution of Dasein. A clue for the articulation is provided by the structure of care: Being-ahead-of-itself and already-beingin- a-world as well as falling and Being-alongside entities within-the-world. This structure points to the originary time. The ‘Being-ahead-of-itself’ indicates an anticipatory dimension. Since such anticipation is already there, it includes a retrieval of what and who the Dasein already is or has been. The anticipation is Dasein’s future. It is the existential future, whereas the retrieval is Dasein’s existential past. Finally, the proximity with other beings points towards Dasein’s present. Since that proximity is properly finite if and only if Dasein resolutely takes over its own Being-towards-the-end, the existential present can only be the instantaneous vision (Augenblick) by Dasein of the situation of its finite existence. Such vision includes a glimpse of the difference between the mode of Being called existence and modes of Being such as readiness-to-hand and presence-athand. Heidegger claims that the foundation of care on the triadic structure of existential time is not at all a philosophical construct. It is ontically or pre-ontologically revealed to each one in the phenomenon of conscience (Gewissen), a phenomenon which is not itself moral in the first place, and demands a description in terms of existentiality. A specific call belongs to the phenomenon of conscience. The structure of such a call reveals a temporal foundation. The call is addressed to a fallen Dasein currently captivated by entities in-the-world. The call comes from Dasein itself in its facticity, a condition in which Dasein as thrown is in the mode of having been. And the message of the call is addressed to Dasein again in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, i.e., in the mode of a future. Heidegger insists that ‘the primordial meaning of existentiality is the future’ (324). However, neither the existential future (anticipation) nor the existential past (retrieval) nor the existential present (instant of vision) has the traditional character of a discrete entity. Because the existential future is a coming-to-oneself, it is a dimension and not at all a not-yet-present moment nor a sequence of not-yet-present moments. In Heidegger’s language it is an ecstasis. Likewise the existential past and the existential present. The word ecstasis, which in Greek means ‘standing outside’, is used by Heidegger in order to emphasize a connotation of stretching towards, or openness to. With this Heidegger associates the notion of horizon. The horizon is that to which each ecstasis is open in a specific way. Existential temporality is ecstatico-horizontal. Now, because the ecstases are interconnected under the primacy of the future, because they belong together intrinsically, temporality is an ecstatic unity of future, past and present. Such unity has itself a horizon which is the condition of possibility of the world as existential and of Dasein’s transcendence. Because of its existentiality, temporality is essentially finite, instead of being an infinite sequence wherein existence would take place. It is the very process through which an intrinsically finite mode of Being opens itself to its own potentiality for Being and to other modes of Being. For the same reason, it is not enough to say that Dasein’s existence is temporal. Rather, Dasein temporalizes. Genuine time is temporalization and even self-temporalization. In its ownmost Being, Dasein exists in such a way that it runs ahead towards its own end (Vorlaufen), retrieves its own thrownness (Wiederholung), and renders present its own situation (Gegenwärtigung). In the light of all this, it turns out that common time, as an infinite sequence, is derived from existential time. According to the common concept of it, time is a sequence of nowmoments revealing itself in counting, a counting done in reference to a motion (the sun or the hands of a clock). In fact, Heidegger says, this reckoning of time is guided by and based upon a reckoning with time: time is already disclosed to us before we use a clock. The disclosure occurs in our daily comportment. Hence our daily reckoning with time is what deserves analysis, if we want to define common time fully. As soon as we approach common time in these terms, we realize that the ‘now’ we check on the clock every day is never a naked and discrete entity given as an object at hand (vorhanden). Now is always ‘now that’ I am doing this or that. When I say now, in daily life, I am always expressing myself as attending to something, as presentifying it. Likewise, when I say ‘at that time’, I display myself as retaining something bygone, either in the mode of recollecting it or in the mode of forgetting it. Similarly, when I say ‘then’, I show that I am expecting something to happen, on its own or by reason of my own deeds. Hence counting time leads back to a reckoning-with-time articulated according to presentification, retention and expectation. But this triad presupposes the existential triad mentioned above. While presupposing the original temporality, however, it also covers it up because of the falling character of everydayness, in which inner-worldly entities tend to prevail upon the existential world. As a result of our fallenness, time becomes an infinite sequence, whereas the original temporality is essentially finite. For the same reason, time becomes irreversible whereas authentic temporality is an ever-renewed encroachment of the past upon the future and vice versa. For the same reason, time gets bound to the motion of things whereas authentic temporality is the ownmost mobility of Dasein. The entire analysis involves an explicit criticism of Aristotle, whose concept of time is indeed a free-floating sequence of nows, and an implicit criticism of Husserl’s notion of time-consciousness which, as an articulation of retentions, living impressions and protentions, does not go beyond the level of everyday preoccupation. The deconstructive reappropriation of the history of ontology As far as Greek philosophy is concerned, there are in fundamental ontology several traces of a ‘deconstructive’ retrieval of Plato. Heidegger agrees with Plato that human beings are naturally philosophers although most of the time people do not care about philosophy. He also agrees with Plato’s characterization of philosophy as a way of Being, a form of existence: the bios theoretikos. The distinction between the ‘They’ (Das Man) and the authentic Self owes much to Plato’s demarcation between the multitude (the polloi) and the philosopher. The description of everydayness in terms of a productive preoccupation owes much to Plato’s condescending characterization of active life in terms of poiēsis. The description of everyday language as empty talk is obviously indebted to Plato’s contempt for doxa (opinion) and sophistry. Above all the Heideggerian hierarchy between three levels of seeing—the immediate intuition (Anschauung) of entities merely present-at-hand; the awareness that the mere presence of those entities is an abstraction deriving from a loss and fall in relation to their readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) open to a practical circumspection; and finally the awareness, reached in the silence of conscience, that the everyday surrounding world (Umwelt) is in a position of falling away from one’s authentic world, a world transparent (durchsichtig) to conscience only—that hierarchy is obviously an echo to the levels of seeing mentioned by Plato in the parable of the cave. As far as medieval thought, with which Heidegger became acquainted during his early theological studies, is concerned, it is possible to recognize in his analytic of Dasein a discreet reappropriation of the scholastic concept of analogia entis (analogy of being). Just as the medieval theologians determined what they called the degrees of Being in terms of an analogy between the kinds of beings and the summum ens (highest being), a divine being whose actuality is devoid of any potentiality and whose essence is identical with its existence, Heidegger determines analogically an hierarchy of the ways of Being, in reference to the Dasein. Thus he characterizes the being of the stone as ‘worldless’ and the being of the animal as ‘poor in world’ on the basis of a unique analogy with Dasein, whose essence, once it is thrown in its Being, is to exist, or to be in the world. Likewise the very distinction between an everyday world in which the Dasein feels at home, and an authentic world in which it is homeless is not without a secularized reminiscence of Augustine’s notion that the world is an exile, and that the Christians do not belong to it. For modern philosophy, fundamental ontology includes a reappropriation and deconstruction of several major authors, such as Leibniz, Kant and Hegel. In Leibniz the ‘principle of ground’ (Satz vom Grund), also for-mulated as the principle of Sufficient Reason which is supposed to provide an ultimate answer to the question ‘why?’, is based on the nature of truth. For Leibniz truth is to be found primarily in judgment, and judgment ultimately consists in an identity between subject and predicate, an identity such that it can be demonstrated that any P is analytically derived from S. But for Leibniz this analytical concept of truth is not simply a matter of logic. It has an ontological basis. Ultimately all the logical propositions ‘S is P’ have their ontological foundation in the monads that harmoniously compose reality, each of them having in itself the reason or ground for what happens to it. At the time of fundamental ontology, Heidegger discussed Leibniz in the published essay The Essence of Reasons (Vom Wesen des Grundes [2.4]), but also in posthumously edited lecture courses such as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic [2.34, 2.48]. Though rejecting the traditional privilege of judgment shared by Leibniz, he agrees with him that the problem of ground has to be dealt with in terms of the problem of truth. He also agrees that any ontic truth presupposes an ontological foundation of a monadic nature. But whereas Leibniz inserts such a foundation into an onto-theological framework, Heidegger attributes it to the transcending process through which the Dasein, as a Self, overcomes beings towards Being. That process of transcendence which is the ontico-ontological difference itself is the foundational coming-to-pass of truth as unconcealment. Kant’s philosophy was also the topic of a deconstructive appropriation. The major proof of this is offered by Heidegger’s book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics [2.3, 2.47]. The book is an attempt to demonstrate that the Critique of Pure Reason, at least in its first edition, somehow anticipates the project of fundamental ontology in its reply to the question ‘How are synthetic judgments possible?’ Heidegger insists that according to Kant the question makes sense only if it stems from a knowing being which is essentially finite. Kant finds the sign of that finitude in the fundamental receptivity of sensibility. Sensible receptivity means that we, human beings, can know only beings that we do not create. However the ontic knowledge of those beings, which for Kant takes place in the experience of natural entities, requires an a priori synthesis which has, Heidegger claims, the nature of an ontological knowledge, i.e., of an a priori comprehension of the Being of those beings. In Kant, that a priori synthesis is the union of pure intuition (the a priori forms of space and time) with the pure categories of the understanding, a union carried out by transcendental imagination through the protection of transcendental schemata characterized as transcendental determinations of time. By recognizing the decisive role of time—more precisely of a temporalizing process performed in the depths of the knowing subject, at the core of a synthetic or ontological knowledge enabling ontic access to beings as objects—Kant would have anticipated Heidegger’s own attempt to show that our openness to beings presupposes a comprehension of their Being, i.e., a transcendence happening in the horizon of temporality. However, in its deconstructive aspect, this reappropriation of Kant also emphasizes the limitations of his endeavour: (1) a framework which is the legacy of Christian metaphysics with its distinction between metaphysica generalis and metaphysica specialis (psychology, cosmology, theology); (2) a one-sided concept of Being as presence-at-hand, therefore a one-sided concept of time, as a sequence of present moments, although Kant’s notion of self-affection partially overcomes this one-sidedness; and (3) also the fact that Kant himself, as evinced by the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, seems to have withdrawn from his own discovery of finite transcendence in the operation of transcendental imagination. Heidegger in Being and Time is entirely critical of Hegel, and at several places in the book he carefully discards any semblance of a proximity between the Hegelian conceptions and his own position. He claims, for example, that the Hegelian definition of time merely maintains traditional views leading back to Aristotle’s Physics, and is onesidedly focused on presence-at-hand. Moreover, he insists on the abstraction and formalism of Hegel, compared to the concreteness of his own fundamental ontology. And against the Hegelian thesis according to which Spirit falls into time, he objects that the very meaning of a ‘fall’ is left in the dark by Hegel. Instead of claiming that Spirit falls into time, the meaningful thesis about the fall should be expressed in this way: ‘factical existence “falls” as falling from primordial, authentic temporality’ ([2.2] 486; [2.45], 435–6). In spite of this apparent discarding of Hegel, readers of Being and Time are allowed to suspect, in relation to the history of ideas, that Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety as a crucial experience which is not to be confused with ordinary fear, and the characterization of Being in terms of ‘no being’ or Nothingness, are not without some relation to Hegelian topics. One is inclined to suspect that there is indeed some reappropriation of Hegel in fundamental ontology. Such a reappropriation comes to the fore in Heidegger’s essay of 1929, What is Metaphysics? [2.5, 2.50], the text of his inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg on the occasion of his accession to the Chair of Philosophy left vacant by the retirement of Husserl. At the outset of this essay, Heidegger states that he is in accord with Hegel’s comment that ‘from the point of view of sound common sense, philosophy is the “inverted world”’ (p. 95). And further on, he reveals a second point of agreement. After a description of anxiety as a meta-physical experience in which nothingness manifests itself, he quotes Hegel’s Science of Logic: ‘Pure Being and pure Nothing are therefore the same’ (Wissenschaft der logik, vol. 1, 111, p. 74). This proposition, Heidegger says, is correct, ‘Being and nothing do belong together’ (Basic Writings, p. 110). To be sure, these two points of agreement are rather formal and Heidegger adds that his own emphasis on the finitude of Being revealing itself in the transcendence of Dasein marks a fundamental divergence in spite of a formal proximity. But a lecture course of 1930–1 devoted to an interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit shows that there was much more than a formal convergence, and that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology really crossed the Hegelian path. Focusing on the transition from consciousness to selfconsciousness, the lecture course claims that Hegel’s notion of ‘life’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit unfolds a concept of Being which is no longer caught in the traditional notion of presence-at-hand. Moreover, Heidegger in the lecture course expresses admiration for the Hegelian description of the movement by which absolute knowledge absolves itself from natural knowledge. That description, he suggests, has to be considered as a transposition in an absolute framework of the very movement of finite transcendence. Finally, fundamental ontology involves a reappropriation of Nietzsche on one point at least: historicality. In Being and Time ([2.45], section 76), Heidegger attempts to demonstrate that historiology (Historie) has its existential source in Dasein’s historicality. Dasein’s Being is essentially historical ‘in so far as by reason of its ecstatico-horizontal temporality it is open in its character of “having been”’ ([2.45], 445). In the context of the demonstration, Heidegger insists that ‘Nietzsche recognized what was essential as to the “use and abuse of historiology for life” in the second of his studies “out of season” (1874), and said it unequivocally and penetratingly’ ([2.45, 448]). For both Heidegger and Nietzsche the so-called objectivity of historical sciences, instead of being primordial, is a falling away from an active movement of uncovering directed towards the future. For both, that active movement is essentially interpretative or hermeneutical. For both, it is also circular because it creates an overlapping of the future and the past. In other words, Heidegger suggests that by saying that only master builders of the future who know the present will understand the past, Nietzsche anticipates the Heideggerian topic of the ‘hermeneutic circle’. THE HISTORY OF BEING Paroxysm and interruption of fundamental ontology The basic principle of the analytic of Dasein, worked out in Being and Time, was: Das Dasein existiert umwillen seiner (‘Dasein exists for the sake of itself). In the light of this principle, the project of fundamental ontology intended to demonstrate under the heading ‘Time and Being’ how the various meanings of Being—such as life, actuality, reality, permanence and so on—had to be understood as deriving from the self-projecting existence of Dasein. But the principle itself was restricted to the way of Being of individuals. That restriction vanished in 1933 when Heidegger decided to support Hitler and became the first National Socialist rector of the University of Freiburg. The focus of his Rectoral Address is no longer the individual Dasein but the Dasein of the German people. As a result of that shift many concepts of Dasein’s analytic undergo a significant metamorphosis. The early version of fundamental ontology had reappropriated the Aristotelian praxis in the direction of Dasein’s solitary insight (theoria) into the finiteness of its own Being, therefore in the direction of Dasein’s bios theoretikos. Heidegger in 1933 once again claims that the intention of the Greeks was to understand theoria, in its relation to Being, as the highest form of praxis. But he adds that theoria, thus understood as the science of the Being of beings, is ‘the very medium that determines, in its ownmost Being, the Dasein of a people and of the State’ (The Self-assertion of the German University (Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität) [2.7], 12). Accordingly, no longer the individual Dasein but the very existence of a people organized in a state seems to become the authentic location for the unconcealment of beings in their totality and in their Being. Now the organization of a people is obviously not a matter of pure theoria, but a matter of technē, of knowhow and of poiēsis. Consequently as a result of the shift from individual Dasein to the Dasein of a people-in-a-state, technē is no longer confined within the inauthentic realm of everydayness. To be sure, there is an ordinary technē which is still restricted to those limits, but, in addition to it, there is now place for an authentic technē, a knowhow which, instead of being fascinated by what is merely present-at-hand, is ontologically creative. In this context, Heidegger recalls an old Greek legend according to which Prometheus would have been the first philosopher, and he quotes the words of Prometheus in Aeschylus’ tragedy: ‘technē however is much weaker than necessity.’ Necessity is here interpreted by him as the ‘overpower’ of destiny. In such ‘overpower’ a concealment of being is involved which challenges knowledge and demands a metaphysical reply, in terms of a creative technē. Along with the transposition of the notion of Dasein to a people, and the introduction of a creative technē, the Rectoral Address also introduces the idea that Being itself, and not only Dasein, is intrinsically polemical and historical; and that Dasein—either as an individual or as a people—is the ‘there’ of Being. But in spite of all these modifications, the Rectoral Address maintains the project of a fundamental ontology, as a task including a metaphysics of Dasein articulated according to the opposition between a fallen everydayness, fascinated by presence-at-hand, and a resolute authenticity dedicated to unconcealing Being by transcending beings. The two lecture courses offered by Heidegger after the rectorate period—a lecture course on Hölderlin [2.37] given in the winter term 1934–5, and a lecture course on the Introduction to Metaphysics [2.8, 2.53] given in the summer term 1935—introduce developments of topics treated in the Rectoral Address, but they also maintain the framework of fundamental ontology. The lecture course on Hölderlin starts by discarding, in order to listen to the poet, all the forms of fallen everydayness already described in Being and Time as obstructing the question: Who is Dasein? The Dasein at stake here, however, is no longer the individual but ‘the authentic gathering of individuals in a community’ ([2.45], 8). Hölderlin’s poetry, in the poems ‘Germania’ and ‘Am Rhein’, is supposed to raise the question: ‘Who are we, the German people?’ The question demands a withdrawal from everydayness and a resolute attitude of racial questioning opposed to the ‘They’. In continuity with Being and Time, Heidegger characterizes everydayness in terms of technē, i.e., circumspection dedicated to the management of surroundings, to production, usefulness and the general progress of culture. That inauthentic comportment encompasses the everyday life of the Nazi regime: cultural activism, subordination of thought and the fine arts to immediate political needs, biologism, and the rule of bureaucrats. But on the level of authenticity there is a place for a quite different technē, adjusted to the historical Dasein of the German people. Only a few individuals are aware of the innermost historiality of that people. These few are the creators: the poet, the thinker and the founder of the state. The co-operation of these three creative types is described by Heidegger in his interpretation of what he calls the Grundstimmung, the basic mood of the two poems, i.e., Hölderlin’s holy mourning in the face of the flight of the gods. The poet institutes (stiftet) the truth of the Dasein of the people. The thinker elucidates and articulates the Being of beings thus disclosed by the poet. But the co-operation of the two requires the people to be led to itself as a people. This can only occur through the creation by the state-creator of a state adjusted to the essence of that people. That triad embodies the Promethean technē mentioned in the Rectoral Address. The three of them rise to the level of demigods preparing the conditions for a return of the divine. The same Promethean trend is to be found in Heidegger’s dialogue with pre-Socratic thought in the Introduction to Metaphysics. As a result of the elevation of a creative technē to the highest ontological level, Heidegger now detects between Parmenides, Heraclitus and Sophocles convergences pointing to an ontological assignment to settinginto- work what the creative technē sees or knows. The assignment is required by the polemical essence of what the early Greek thinkers called physis, an appellation which, like the word alētheia, is taken to be another name for Being. Being is polemical because, on the one hand, it is an unconcealment which retains itself in itself while disclosing itself in beings; and because, on the other hand, it is again and again threatened, in its very disclosure, by sheer semblance, deception, illusion. Therefore it is an ‘overpowering’ calling for a creative self-assertion defined as a decision (Entscheidung) to provide a ‘separation in the togetherness of Being, unconcealment; appearance, and Non- Being’ ([2.8], 84; [2.53], 92). And since there is a violence in the ‘overpowering’ of Being such decision has to be disrupting and violent. This violent response to the ‘overpowering’ of Being is what characterizes technē in its essential meaning. Technē provides the basic trait of the Greek deinon (uncanny) evoked in a famous chorus of Sophocles’ Antigone. So understood, technē is both a knowledge and a creative power. As a knowledge, it is a sight looking beyond what is present-at-hand; as a creative power, it is the capacity to set-into-work within being the historical unconcealment of Being. In this context, Heidegger claims that unconcealment takes place only when it is achieved by work: ‘the work of word in poetry, the work of stone in temple and statue, the work of the word in thought, the work of the polis as the historical place in which all this is grounded and preserved’ (pp. 146; 160). In this context, Heidegger celebrates what he calls ‘the inner truth and greatness’ of the National-Socialist movement versus the ideology (racism) and everyday practice of the Nazi Party. In these two lecture courses the introduction of a distinction between a petty technē trapped in everydayness or presence-at-hand and a lofty technē able to set-in-work Being itself in its unconcealment not only leaves untouched but even reinforces the articulation of fundamental ontology—i.e., the opposition between ordinary time and authentic temporality. The fact that the Dasein at stake is now understood as the Dasein of a people, either Greek or German, simply widens the basic principle of Being and Time according to which the Dasein exists for its own sake and by willing itself. It could even be said that the Promethean connotation of these texts brings fundamental ontology to a sort of metaphysical climax. Heidegger suggests, indeed, that it is because of its foundational role towards his people that his own work deserved the heading of fundamental ontology (pp. 113; 146). And he quotes with admiration Hegel’s words in the Logic of 1812: ‘A people without a metaphysics is like a temple without a Holy of Holies.’ Metaphysics is thus the privilege of Germany, whereas western democracies, particularly the United States, on the one hand, and the USSR on the other hand, are said to be absorbed in the frenetic development of the petty technē. However, this paroxysm was soon going to bring fundamental ontology to an end, and to open the way to a ‘turn’ (Kehre) in Heidegger’s thought. A comparison between the successive versions of his essay The Origin of the Work of Art bears witness to such a turn, or at least to a shift in Heidegger’s treatment of the question of Being. Indeed the two early versions of the essay preserve the Promethean tendency which characterized the Introduction to Metaphysics; whereas the third and final version is no longer Promethean at all. All the topics tackled by the Introduction to Metaphysics—the people and its gods, the greatness of a creative technē, decision, the ontological polemos (conflict)—are still mentioned in the final version, but they lose their previous hardness thanks to an overall tonality which is more meditative and open to enigmas than voluntarist and proclamatory. In the three versions, Heidegger insists that there is a circle in the investigation into the origin of the work of art. Indeed, if it is true that the artist is the origin of the work, it is also true that the work is the origin of the artist since neither is without the other. However, both are what they are by virtue of art itself. But if it is true that the essence of art should be inferred from the work, it is no less true that we could not recognize a work of art as such without referring to the essence of art. Hence the interrogation into the origin of the work of art moves in a circle. In the two early versions of the essay the topic of the circle operates as a device for signifying the circular character of Dasein as a being which projects its own Self by retrieving its thrownness, in such a way that project is a retrieval, and retrieval is a project. But in the final version that emphasis on Dasein’s existence for its own sake is replaced by an emphasis on Being itself inasmuch as Being is neither limited to beings nor without them, and neither encapsulated in Dasein nor without it. Moreover, whereas the early versions insisted on the contrast between everydayness and creative self-assertion, the final version is almost without sign of a contempt for everydayness and its pettiness. It is significant in this regard that the first section of the final version of the essay is entirely devoted to the question: what is a thing in its thingly character? In the framework of fundamental ontology, as well as in the early versions of the essay, that question was clearly not an important issue for the task of thinking, and there was nothing enigmatic in the question. Indeed, there was an easy answer to it, in terms of everydayness: the Being of things is either presence-at-hand (natural things) or readiness-to-hand (equipment). By contrast, the final version of the essay states the following: ‘The unpretentious thing evades thought most stubbornly. Can it be that this self-refusal of the mere thing, this self-contained independence, belongs precisely to the nature of the thing? Must not this strange feature of the nature of the thing become what a thought that has to think the thing confides in? If so, then we should not force our way to its thingly character’ ([2.55], 32). In other words, everydayness, instead of being the familiar realm that resoluteness has to overcome in order to face the homelessness of existence, now becomes strange and deserves meditation in its familiar outlook. Dwelling among things no longer obstructs thought, quite the contrary. It is also significant that the reliability of equipment previously defined by its readiness-to-hand, hence in relation to Dasein only, now turns out to bear testimony to an enigmatic interplay of unconcealment and concealment in Being itself. This is what Heidegger tries to suggest in his meditation on one of Van Gogh’s paintings of a pair of shoes. The second section of the final version of the essay also marks a change regarding the notion of truth. Heidegger’s point in the three versions is that in the work of art truth sets itself to work. Truth, here once again understood as alētheia or unconcealment, is of an essentially ambiguous and polemical nature, for it is a mixture of disclosedness and withdrawal. This polemical nature of truth is revealed by the conflictual nature of the work of art. While setting up a world, the artwork sets forth the earth, but whereas the world is an opening of paths, the earth is a self-seclusion. Hence there is in the work of art a strife between world and earth. Such strife characterizes truth itself as unconcealment. But whereas the early versions of the essay maintain the priority of Dasein regarding truth by making the Dasein of a people the locus of truth, the final version characterizes unconcealment as a clearing (Lichtung) to which human beings belong and are exposed. Consequently the meaning of resoluteness also changes: it is no longer the project to be a Self but an exposure to the secret withdrawal at the core of the clearing. Finally, the last section of the final version is an attempt to define creation without reference to Promethean self-assertion. What is now considered to be fundamental in the work, inasmuch as it is created, is no longer its ability to anticipate in a leap what a people decides to be. What is decisive in it, as created, is this: ‘that such work is at all rather than is not’ ([2.55], 65). In other words, the enigma of a coming-to-presence now overcomes the previous privilege of future self-projection. The creator is no longer a violent struggler but someone receptive to the clearing. The turn and the overcoming of metaphysics Why did Heidegger give up his project of fundamental ontology? The question raises an extremely complex issue and there are at least three ways of approaching it. From a strictly systematic point of view, it is possible to notice a paradox at the core of the project. Indeed if fundamental ontology—the science of the meaning of Being—is identified with the ontological analysis or metaphysics of Dasein (as seemed to be the case up to the Introduction to Metaphysics), then, as Heidegger himself said at the time, ‘ontology has an ontical foundation’ (Basic Problems, p. 26). But how is it possible to avoid then the reduction of Being to characteristics of a being, more precisely to Dasein’s way of Being? If, on the other hand, the metaphysics of Dasein is only the provisional preparation of a systematic ontology, then a distinction has to be made between the temporality of Dasein and the temporality of Being itself; and, consequently, the provisional character of the analytic of Dasein contradicts its allegedly fundamental function. In both cases, the attempt made in Being and Time (and later extended to surpass the limits of individual Dasein) turns out paradoxically to be itself a manner of oblivion of Being to the benefit of a being. A second way of approaching the issue would be a close chronological investigation of the variations, appearing during the 1930s and early 1940s, in Heidegger’s use of the notions coined in Being and Time. Such investigation remains to be done on a twofold basis: the lecture courses already published or in the process of being edited in the Gesamtausgabe, particularly those on Nietzsche (1936–41), and the long text written by Heidegger for his own use under the heading Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosophie 1936–8) [2.38]. A third approach is offered by Heidegger’s own explanations of what he called the ‘turn’ which, at some point, occurred in his thought. The first among these selfinterpretations is Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, written in 1946 in reply to questions raised by Jean Beaufret. It is not certain, however, that the results of the three approaches could ever coincide, mainly because of Heidegger’s tendency to justify retrospectively each step of his philosophical development. Despite these difficulties there is no doubt that several topics which had no place whatsoever in fundamental ontology came to the fore during the second half of the 1930s. The lecture courses on Nietzsche are extremely significant in this regard. It has been noticed by several readers of the Nietzschebuch (Mehta; Arendt) that in the first lecture courses (1936–9) Heidegger interprets Nietzsche in terms of the analytic of Dasein and shows a basic agreement with Nietzsche, whereas the courses of 1939–41 are polemical. This is why Hannah Arendt claimed that initially the ‘turn’ was a biographical event, by which she meant that, underneath a polemical debate with Nietzsche, it was an explanation of Heidegger to himself, and an attempt to discard his own voluntarist inclinations during his activist period. At any rate, what comes to the fore in the polemic against Nietzsche is a new way of considering the history of metaphysics. In fundamental ontology, the point was to deconstruct the biases and confusions inherent in past philosophies in order to liberate metaphysics and complete it as the science of the meaning of Being. Now, the point is to consider its development as a fatal destiny and to prepare its overcoming. That destiny is characterized as an increasing oblivion of Being culminating in Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will-to-power and of the eternal return of the same, interpreted by Heidegger as nihilism. At the dawn of western thought, the key words of the pre-Socratic thinkers, above all the word alētheia, all signalled the process through which beings are brought to the ‘open’ in tension between a reserve and an appearing. This means that Being was experienced as fully differentiated in the manner of an offering which withholds itself in what it gives. This differentiation indicates a finiteness of Being to which corresponds thinking as a receptivity to the secret of Being. The first erasing of this differentiated correspondence and mutual belonging starts with Plato. Plato’s dialogues demonstrate a tendency to transform a mere consequence of the ambiguous process of alētheia into the essence of truth. In Plato beings reveal their beingness through ideas. The word initially meant the outlook offered by things as they emerge out of physis. Therefore it meant a consequence of the process of unconcealment. But Plato’s ideas come to the forefront and get split off from the unconcealing process. Moreover, they acquire a normative status in relation to physis. Unconcealment then becomes a result of the clarity of the ideas which themselves refract the clarity of a supreme idea, the Good. This is the birth of metaphysics as onto-theology. The task of metaphysics from now on is to develop a theory of the essence of beings, a logic of their beingness, i.e., an ontology, and simultaneously to develop a theology by relating their beingness to a primordial being. Alētheia is thus obliterated by an ontical hierarchy, and truth becomes a matter of correctly seeing the ideas. Accordingly, the mutual belonging of Being in its ambiguity and of thinking in its receptivity to the same is levelled down to a contemplative conformity of the mind to essences. A second stage in the metaphysical oblivion of Being took place in the Middle Ages. In medieval thought the Platonic concept of truth as conformity of the intellect to the beingness of beings, coupled with the founding role of a supreme being, was retrieved within the Christian speculations about creation and the dependence of the created on the creator. Truth in the scholastic sense of adaequatio intellects ad rem (adequacy of the mind to the thing) is now grounded upon the deeper adaequatio rei Dei intellectus (adequacy of the thing to the mind of God). A third stage occurred at the beginning of the modern age with the invention of subjectivity. When Galileo Galilei introduces, in still approximate terms, the first formulation of what Newton, a few decades later, was to call the principle of inertia, he uses the words ‘mente concipio’ (conceive in my mind). What is significant here, for Heidegger, is not the replacement of the sensible outlook of natural phenomena (the cornerstone of Aristotelian physics) by a purely intellectual approach of nature, but the fact that inertia, in order to appear at all, requires the human mind to give itself a preconception of what motion is and thus projects in advance the condition for phenomenality. In the conformity of adequation between intellect and thing, the stress is now put on the intellect in such a way that the thing manifests its truth inasmuch as it fits with a project emanating from the mens. Deeper than the modern use of mathematics in physics, there is what Descartes called mathēsis—a project by which the cogito ascertains itself on its own and acquires a position of mastery. In Descartes’ philosophy, with the restriction of the dependence of the finite human mind on the divine infinity, the cogito posits itself as the unique basis upon which beings reveal their beingness. The word for basis in Greek was hupokeimenon, in Latin subjectum. The cogito becomes the only subjectum. The rule of subjectivity begins. The modern object-subject correlation means that beings are what they are to the extent that they submit themselves to the rule of the human cogito. Such is the birth of the reckoning and evaluating reason which determines modernity. All its features appear at the outset. The mathēsis is universalis, which means that it is planning for the totality of beings. It is both a subjectivation of all beings referring them to the cogito and an objectivation making them all equally calculable and controllable. Earlier than the current reign of technology, right at the beginning of the modern era, nature as a whole was conceived as one huge mechanism in relation to a technological way of looking. Between Descartes and Nietzsche, Heidegger does not notice a fundamental discontinuity. Nietzsche’s notion of the will-to-power was in several ways anticipated by Descartes and subsequent thinkers: Leibniz’s notion of the monad as a conjunction of perception and appetite in addition to his principle of Sufficient Reason; Kant’s concept of reason as a condition of possibility; Fichte’s reinterpretation of Kant in terms of practical reason; Schelling’s conviction that there is no other Being than the Will; Hegel’s concept of the Absolute, willing its self-identity throughout differentiation. So while claiming to be liberated from metaphysics, Nietzsche was merely bringing it to its accomplishment and carrying modern subjectivity to an onto-theological climax. Heidegger indeed interprets the will-to-power in ontological terms as the beingness of all beings, and the eternal return of the same in theological terms as the ultimate ground of beingness and being. Defined as the beingness of all beings, the will-to-power pushes to an extreme limit the project of objectivation and subjectivation inherent in mathēsis. Objectivation is brought to an extreme because the will not only treats every being as an object (Gegenstand) but also compels any object to become a storage (Bestand) available to all kinds of assignment and manipulation. Subjectivation is brought to an extreme as well, for all things are reduced to the values that the will bestows on them in order to intensify its power. On the other hand, the eternal return of the same, defined as the ultimate form of being, signifies an endless, circular, repetitive machination which is the metaphysical essence of modern technology. The abyssal thought of the eternal return means that the will aiming to intensify itself is itself willed and challenged to will itself infinitely. On both counts, Being has definitely lost the enigmatic ambiguity which was experienced by the early Greeks. Being is like nothing. Nihilism rules. It is significant of the ‘turn’ at work in this meditation on modernity that Heidegger’s description of what he calls ‘European nihilism’ in a 1940 lecture course on Nietzsche includes the following remarks about Being and Time: ‘The path followed in it is interrupted at a decisive place. The interruption is explainable by the fact that, all the same, the attempt made on that path was running the risk, against its own intention, to reinforce furthermore subjectivity’ (Gesamtausgabe vol. 48, p. 261). The main result of the above description of the history of metaphysics is the claim that modern technology is the last accomplishment of a long process of oblivion of Being inherent in metaphysics since Plato. Heidegger uses the word Gestell to characterize the nature of modern technology. Gestell is a global ‘enframing’ wherein beings are entirely available to all sorts of arbitrary evaluations and manipulations, and in which Being counts for nothing. To that global enframing Heidegger opposes what he calls Ereignis, often translated as ‘event of appropriation’, a term already used in his Beiträge of 1936– 8. Within the global enframing, thinking is replaced by calculation. It is only by meditating Ereignis that thinking can remain alive. Thinking the Ereignis is a countercurrent to nihilism. That opposition pervades the writings of Heidegger after the Second World War. In all of them the voluntarist tonality of Being and Time and of the Introduction to Metaphysics has vanished. Significantly the word Dasein is now spelled Da-sein: there-being. The mortals are the ‘there’ of Being. They are exposed to the secret granting of Being. Significantly, also, a topic such as the ‘call’, which was restricted in Being and Time to Dasein’s listening to its ownmost potentiality, now emanates from Being itself. Whereas in fundamental ontology the human Dasein was the lieutenant of nothingness, it is now the shepherd of Being. Whereas fundamental ontology somehow conflated thinking and willing, thinking is now a matter of not-willing, of letting-be (Gelassenheit), and even of thanking. Whereas fundamental ontology conceived of dwelling in terms of a preoccupation of inauthentic everydayness, dwelling now deserves profound meditation. Likewise for the ‘thing’, a topic to which Heidegger devoted several essays in the late period. Likewise for speech, formerly taken as a capacity of Dasein, and now characterized in terms of a call emanating from Being, of a gathering of Being and of a corresponding to it. That shift from Dasein to Being explains why Heidegger criticized humanism as an aspect of metaphysics. The shift of emphasis also generates a change in Heidegger’s thought about time. While maintaining the notion of ecstasis, Heidegger no longer understands ecstatical temporalization in terms of an existential self-project, but in terms of a belonging of Dasein to the ambiguous unconcealing process of Being allegedly covered up by the entire tradition of metaphysics. This becomes apparent in a lecture given by Heidegger more than thirty years after Being and Time, under the significant title Time and Being (1962). This is the title which had been announced in 1927 as the heading of the third division of the book, a division which never appeared. The lecture of 1962, however, is not to be considered as the completion of the project of 1927. It is a significant feature of the ‘turn’ that the topic is presented in neutral terms, in which Dasein no longer plays a central role. Heidegger indeed announces that his meditation is oriented by the sentence ‘Es gibt Sein, Es gibt Zeit’, which literally means: ‘It gives Being, It gives time.’ This neutral phrasing clearly suggests that the issue is no longer Dasein’s temporalization. In both sentences, the phrase ‘Es gibt’ invites the audience to hear an offering which is not itself reducible to what it is offering. Hence the sentence ‘It gives time’ points to anoffering which keeps withdrawing itself within what is offered. Already in the word ‘present’ there is more than the now; what is also meant by the word is a gift bestowed upon man. Open to the presence of the present, mortals welcome the granting. The emphasis is no longer on the project of the self but on receptivity to the granting. In this context, the prior concept of ecstasis is modified. Each ecstasis, as well as the unity of the three ecstases, is now understood as a granting extended to human beings. Instead of saying that the past is what we retrieve in the light of our finite project, Heidegger now says that it happens to us, extending itself to us and soliciting us. The past is an ecstasis in the sense of the coming towards ourselves of an absence which concerns us while it is granted to us. Absence is itself a mode of presence if we think of presence in the sense of a granting. But in each there is an interplay of granting and withholding. The same holds true for the unity of the ecstases. Heidegger now calls each ecstasis a dimension, and he calls the unity of the ecstaseis the fourth dimension of time. About such unity, Heidegger no longer evokes a privilege of the future. The emphasis is now on the coming-to-presence. Moreover, instead of evoking Dasein’s temporalization, he suggests that time temporalizes from itself. The unifying fourth dimension of time is characterized as a disclosed interplay of the three ecstases, a clearing extension, an opening. However it is also characterized by a denial, a withholding. Time nears and holds back. It is radically ambiguous. The granting, effective in it, is also a denial. This new apprehension of time is at the core of Heidegger’s notion of Ereignis which he opposes to Gestell—the technological enframing for which there is no secret whatsoever. In German Ereignis means ‘event’. In Heidegger’s terminology it designates the co-belonging of Being and man. He insists on both etymological roots of the word. They are er-eignen, ‘appropriating’, and ‘er-äugen’, bringing to visibility. There is no doubt that the use of the word in this twofold meaning signifies a contrast with the use of words such as eigen (‘own’), and Eigentlichkeit (‘authentic selfhood’) in Being and Time. The Ereignis is not to be conceived of in terms of the Self at issue in the work of 1927. What is at stake in it is no longer a project but a Schicken, a sending or a destining. The event of co-belonging between Being and man is the manner in which Being destines itself to us, by opening the playspace (Spielraum) of time wherein beings appear. But destiny withholds itself in order for its granting to occur. The history of Being is that destiny. In it each epoch is an epokhē, a withholding of Being within its donation. In each case the Ereignis witholds (enteignet) itself. Consequently the task of thinking is no longer to be defined by the phrase ‘Being and time’ but by the phrase Lichtung und Anwesenheit, ‘clearing and coming-to-presence’, both understood in terms of a granting and a denial. The trouble with this history of Being is that, in spite of the above signals of a significant shift in Heidegger’s thought, it reproduces in a new way the previous contrast between the ‘They’ and the Self. Indeed only a few German poets (Hölderlin, Trakl, George) and Heidegger himself—but not the plurality of human beings interacting in a common world of appearances and events—seem able to properly respond to the ambiguity of the destiny of Being. Moreover, the previous privilege of Dasein’s bios theoretikos reapppears in a new manner: thinking is the only activity able to prepare a new beginning in the history of Being. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Major books published by Heidegger himself 2.1 Frühe Schriften (1912–16), ed. F.-W.von Hermann, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978. 2.2 Sein und Zeit (1927), Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953. 2.3 Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1927), Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1951. 2.4 Vom Wesen des Grundes, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1928. 2.5 Was ist Metaphysik? (1929), Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1955. 2.6 Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (1930, 1943), Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1961. 2.7 Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität, Breslau: Korn, 1933. Later reprinted in Das Rektorat 1933/34: Tatsachen und Gedanken, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983. 2.8 Einführung in die Metaphysik (1935), Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953. 2.9 Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (1936, 1944), Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2.10 Holzwege (1936–46). Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1950. 2.11 Nietzsche (1936–46), 2 vols, Pfullingen: Neske, 1961. 2.12 Vorträge und Aufsätze (1943–54). Pfullingen: Neske, 1961. Contains eleven essays, including ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’ and ‘Bauen, Wohnen, Denken’. 2.13 Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit (1942). Mit einem Brief über den ‘Humanismus’ (1946), Bern: Francke, 1947. 2.14 Was heisst Denken? (1951–52), Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1954. 2.15 Was ist das—die Philosophie? (1955), Pfullingen: Neske, 1956. 2.16 Zur Seinsfrage (1955), Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1956. 2.17 Der Satz vom Grund (1955–6), Pfullingen: Neske, 1957. 2.18 Identität und Differenz, Pfullingen: Neske, 1957. 2.19 Unterwegs zur Sprache (1950–9), Pfullingen: Neske, 1957. 2.20 Gelassenheit, Pfullingen: Neske, 1959. 2.21 Die Frage nach dem Ding (1936, 1962), Pfullingen: Neske, 1962. 2.22 Die Technik and die Kehre, Pfullingen: Neske, 1962. 2.23 Wegmarken (1967), Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978. 2.24 Zur Sache des Denkens, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969. 2.25 Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1936), ed. H.Feieck, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1971. 2.26 Phänomenologie und Theologie (1927, 1954), Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1972. Major lecture courses and manuscripts Published in Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe (Collected Edition), Frankfurt: Klostermann: 2.27 Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (1921–2), ed. W.Bröcker and K.Bröcker-Oltmanns, GA 61, 1985. 2.28 Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität (1923), ed. K.Bröcker-Oltmanns, GA 63, 1988. 2.29 Platon: Sophistes (1924–5), ed. I.Schüssler, GA 19, 1992. 2.30 Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (1925), ed. P.Jaeger, GA 20, 1979. 2.31 Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit (1925–6), ed. W.Biemel, GA 21, 1976. 2.32 Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1927), ed. F.W.von Hermann, GA 24, 1975. 2.33 Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1927–8), ed. I.Görland, GA 25, 1977. 2.34 Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik (1928), ed. K.Held, GA 26, 1978. 2.35 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit (1929–30), ed F.- W.von Hermann, GA 29/30, 1983. 2.36 Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1930), ed. H.Tietgen, GA 31, 1982. 2.37 Hölderlins Hymnen ‘Germanien’ und ‘Der Rhein’ (1934–5), ed. S.Ziegler, GA 39, 1980. 2.38 Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis (1936–8), ed. F.-W.von Hermann, GA 65, 1989. 2.39 Grundfragen der Philosophie (1937–8), ed. F.-W.von Hermann, GA 45, 1984. 2.40 Grundbegriffe (1941), ed. P.Jaeger, GA 51, 1981. 2.41 Hölderlins Hymne ‘Andenken’ (1941–2), ed. C.Ochwaldt, GA 52, 1982. 2.42 Hölderlins Hymne ‘Der Ister’ (1942), ed. W.Biemel, GA 53, 1984. 2.43 Parmenides (1942–3), ed. M.S.Frings, GA 54, 1982. Translations 2.44 History of the Concept of Time, trans. T.Kisiel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. 2.45 Being and Time, trans. J.Macquarrie and E.Robinson, London: SCM Press, 1962. 2.46 The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A.Hofstadter, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. 2.47 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. S.Churchill, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962. 2.48 The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. M.Heim, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. 2.49 The Essence of Reasons, trans. T.Malich, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969. 2.50 What is Metaphysics?, trans. D.F.Krell, in M.Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. D.F.Krell, New York: Harper & Row, 1977, pp. 95–116. 2.51 On the Essence of Truth, trans. J.Sallis, in Basic Writings, pp. 117–41. 2.52 ‘The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts’, trans. K.Harries, Review of Metaphysics, 38 (March 1985):467–502. 2.53 An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R.Manheim, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959. 2.54 Nietzsche, trans, and ed. D.F.Krell in 4 vols, New York: Harper & Row, 1979. 2.55 The Origin of the Work of Art’, third version, from Holzwege, trans. A. Hofstadter in M.Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, New York: Harper & Row, 1971, pp. 7– 87. 2.56 The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W.Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row, 1977, pp. 3–35. 2.57 ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, trans. A.Hofstadter, in Basic Writings, pp. 323–39. 2.58 Three essays on Heraclitus and Parmenides, trans. D.F.Krell and F.A. Capuzzi, in M.Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, New York: Harper & Row, 1975. 2.59 ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’, trans. J.Barlow in W.Barrett et al. (eds), Philosophy in the Twentieth Century II, New York: Random House, 1962, pp. 251–70. 2.60 ‘Letter on Humanism’, trans. F.A.Capuzzi and J.G.Gray, in Basic Writings, pp. 193– 242. 2.61 What is Called Thinking?, trans. F.D.Wieck and J.G.Gray, New York: Harper & Row, 1968. 2.62 What is Philosophy?, trans. J.R.Wilde and W.Klubach, New Haven: College and University Press, 1968. 2.63 The Question of Being, trans. W.Klubach and J.T.Wilde, New York: Twayne, 1958. 2.64 The Principle of Reason, trans. R.Lilly, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. 2.65 Identity and Difference, trans. J.Stambaugh, New York: Harper & Row, 1969. 2.66 On the Way to Language, trans. P.D.Hertz and J.Stambaugh, New York: Harper & Row, 1966. 2.67 Discourse on Thinking, trans. J.M.Anderson and E.H.Freund, New York: Harper & Row, 1966. 2.68 What is a Thing?, trans. W.Barton and V.Deutsch, Chicago: Regnery, 1969. 2.69 ‘The Turning’, trans. W.Lovitt in [2.56], 36–49. 2.70 On Time and Being, trans. J.Stambaugh, New York: Harper & Row, 1972. 2.71 The Piety of Thinking, trans. J.G.Hart and J.C.Maraldo, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. Criticism 2.72 Arendt, H. The Life of the Mind, 2 vols, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977–8. 2.73 Beaufret, J. Dialogue avec Heidegger, 3 vols, Paris: Minuit, 1973–4. 2.74 Biemel, W. Le Concept de monde chez Heidegger, Louvain and Paris: Nauwelaerts, 1950. 2.75 Birault, H. Heidegger et l’expérience de la pensée, Paris: Gallimard, 1978. 2.76 Dastur, F. Heidegger et la question du temps, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990. 2.77 De Waelhens, A. La Philosophie de Martin Heidegger, Louvain and Paris: Nauwelaerts, 1942. 2.78 Derrida, J. De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question, Paris: Galilée, 1987. 2.79 Haar, M. (ed.) Martin Heidegger, Paris: Cahiers de l’Herne, 1983. 2.80 Haar, M. Heidegger et l’essence de l’homme, Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1990. 2.81 Hermann, F.-W.von, Die Selbstinterpretation Martin Heideggers, Meisenheim am Glan: A.Hain, 1964. 2.82 Janicaud, D. L’Ombre de cette pensée: Heidegger et la question politique, Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1990. 2.83 Kockelmans, J.J. On the Truth of Being: Reflections on Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. 2.84 Lacoue-Labarthe, P. La Fiction du politique, Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1987. 2.85 Marx, W. Heidegger and the Tradition, trans. T.J.Kisiel and M.Greene, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971. 2.86 Mehta, J.L. The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger, New York: Harper & Row, 1971. 2.87 Ott, H. Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie, Frankfurt: Campus, 1988. 2.88 Pöggeler, O. Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking (1963) trans. D.Magurshak and S.Barber, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1987. 2.89 Pöggeler, O. Philosophie und Politik bei Heidegger, Freiburg: Alber, 1972. 2.90 Richardson W. Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1963. 2.91 Rockmore, T. and Margolin, J. (eds), The Heidegger Case, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. 2.92 Sallis, J. (ed.), Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. 2.93 Schürmann R. Le Principe d’anarchie: Heidegger et la question de l’agir, Paris: Seuil, 1982. 2.94 Sheehan, T. (ed.) Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, Chicago: Precedent Publishing, Inc., 1981. 2.95 Taminiaux, J. Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology (1989), trans. M.Gendre, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. 2.96 Taminiaux, J. La fille de Thrace et le penseur professionnel: Arendt et Heideg ger, Paris: Payot, 1992. 2.97 Zimmerman, M. Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1990.